Swapping Meth for Weed: What We Know So Far About the UK's Real-Life Walter White

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

About two years ago, a middle-aged woman from a quiet village became a short-lived tabloid sensation. To outsiders, Susan McKay had been living a bog-standard life as a teacher, mother and co-owner of a local bed and breakfast. The unexpected and somewhat confusing layers to her lifestyle fell away in April 2014 when police seized up to £96,000 [$137,000] worth of cannabis growing and drying in four rooms around her family's seven-bedroom B&B country house. Susan was pinpointed at the center of the whole operation.

The story reads like a cross between Weeds and Breaking Bad—if it were also a primetime TV show and not the real-life tale of a chemistry teacher living in a posh-looking place in north Wales. It's in the news again because on Friday, April 1, a judge ordered 58-year-old comprehensive school teacher Susan to pay back £33,500 [$48,000] in estimated profits that she would have earned from her drug stock.

Susan and her son Michael, who didn't live in the B&B at the time, both pleaded guilty to conspiring to supply cannabis last year. Michael has to pay £2,000 [$2,850] in "criminal benefit" for his involvement—but more on that in a bit. Finally, Susan's husband Owen McKay—who later pleaded guilty to the same charge, on account of his "turning a blind eye" to the grow house—was ordered to pay £22,000 [$31,000].

Let's rewind for a minute here. Like Walter White, Susan's story—as she and her barrister posited it—started off with the best intentions. She'd been grieving and going through an awful time, the court heard, after her son Daniel had killed himself. Another of her sons was living with cystic fibrosis. She'd run into some financial trouble, and then found out her 73-year-old husband was 10 years into an affair with another woman, after fathering a child outside of his marriage from that relationship.

"None of these she uses as excuses for her behavior but perhaps it provides some explanation why a person like her behaves in this bizarre and frankly ridiculous way," her barrister Duncan Bould told the court back in 2015. "We are dealing with an intelligent, dignified, and mature woman who has been in responsible employment all her adult life and is still in a job."

Well, she was at the time. While Susan's case was going through hearings in 2015, she kept teaching at Wrexham's Clywedog School. It was basically like season one of Breaking Bad, when Walter's still tucking in those button-up shirts every morning before lurching around in the classroom as his hacking cough takes over his body. But in December 2015, Susan was banned indefinitely from teaching in Wales overall, and apologized "unreservedly for the embarrassment [her case] caused the school," in a letter read out at a hearing called by Wales' independent regulator for teachers.

Revisit our doc, 'The Real Walter White?':

So yes, there were parallels between both how she and Walter started out in the drugs world—a lack of money—and their ability to hold down their day jobs while they started to navigate their side hustles. But one of the weirdest aspects of this case centers on the fact that none of the cannabis grown in the McKay's B&B was ever sold.

This is where Susan's story veers away from life imitating art, whether you've cast her as Weeds' Nancy Botwin or Walter White in your mind. The cannabis was just sitting there: in the black grow room tents positioned in three of the B&B's bedrooms and drying in one of the bathrooms. There's almost no information out yet on how exactly a teacher who said she'd "never been in trouble before" landed the equipment and know-how to fill parts of her house with more than 100 cannabis plants. This feels like as good a time as any to reintroduce her 27-year-old son, Michael.

One small mistake he made catalyzed the whole grow operation's breakdown, when police pulled him over for driving without lights in Denbighshire in April 2014. After the cops smelled cannabis coming from inside the car, a quick search uncovered about £1,000 [$1,400] worth of the drug. Michael, a heavyweight boxer who actually lived in Chester, was on his way to his parents' house that night, and police discovered the whole stash when they then searched the B&B. He said later in court that his mom had approached him with the idea and, against his better judgment, he'd agreed to help.

"I must have had a breakdown because of what has been happening in my personal life," Susan said last year, after being handed a suspended jail time sentence. "I am not a bad person."

As it stands, she and her husband have 20-month jail sentences, suspended for 18 months at their original sentencing, while Michael was given a five-month sentence, suspended for a year. If they don't pay up those criminal benefit estimates, jail awaits. Hey, even Nancy Botwin had to suck it up and serve a bit of prison time.